Do you come home from the store with loads of groceries and find yourself overloaded with plastic or paper bags? At first you may keep a few to reuse for packing a lunch or as a trash bag but after weekly and sometime daily visits to the store your bag collection can grow to enormous proportions, which may lead you to ball them up and throw them away.
Of course placing them in a trashcan, or better yet the recycling bin, is better than throwing them on the street but the impact of plastic and paper bags can be more of a threat than expected even if you are taking the proper precautions to keep them from littering the roadways.
According to a website, www.resuablebag.com, “Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photo-degrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food web that animals accidentally ingest.” There was once a debate that paper bags were better but according to reusable.com “it takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag” and manufacturing of paper bags “generates 70% more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags.” To alleviate your worry regarding how your shopping habits effect the environment a new trend is hitting stores and shoppers. Now many stores are offering a choice other than paper or plastic by selling reusable bags around the cash registers.
This trend is present in several stores around Thomasville in hopes that shoppers will become trendsetters and join the reusable bag effort. If purchasing bags at your favorite store is not allotted in your weekly shopping budget there is an alternative - make your own. Making your own bags can is very simple and only requires a few t-shirts and glue.
First gather your supplies: old t-shirts or tank tops, fabric glue, and scissors. Turn the shirt inside out and glue the bottom of the shirt together. If you are using a tank top once the glue has dried your bag is ready to be used. Simply turn the shirt right side out. If you are using a t-shirt, cut off the sleeves once the glue dries and then cut a larger opening around the neck of the shirt creating handles. If you have access to a sewing machine, a simple stitch in place of the fabric glue will work as well. Get your kids involved by letting them decorate the bags with paint and gemstones. You can make enough bags for your weekly or daily shopping trips in less time than it will take you to figure out what to do with all of those plastic and paper bags.
Visit the City Beautification Committee’s blog at www.citybeautification.blogspot.com for more information and pictures on how to make a reusable t-shirt bag. Next time you visit the store and the cashier asks “paper or plastic?” answer; neither, I brought or better yet made my own.
Published in the Thomasville Times by Pam Baldwin
ETSY Tutorial
They create everything from 
If you are looking for a fun pair of 
Check out the website 
